Hanging Time

36

At five past twelve on the Sunday afternoon before Labor Day, April slid into a seat at a tiny back table at the Dim Sum Tea House. Next to her a chubby young woman with badly permed hair cooled a spoonful of noodles in her mouth, then fed the half-chewed mess to her baby. April looked away as the baby spit it out.

George Dong shook his head and resolutely studied his menu. “Delightful. What do you feel like?”

April smiled politely. Like going right home. Right away she didn’t like him. She didn’t care if he was a doctor. He had to be a fool, taking her to the kind of place where mothers make baby food in their mouth, then expecting her to choose something from the menu when it was a dim sum place. It was a no-win situation, like a trick question she couldn’t possibly get right. She glanced at the menu. It was a long one.

“I don’t know yet.” She decided the polite thing was to consider the menu. She’d been a cop long enough to know Dr. Dong was solemnly studying her as if she, too, were an item on the list.

She was wearing blue trousers, as usual, with a white blouse and red jacket. She had wanted to wear her white vest and jacket, very chic; but Skinny Dragon Mother, who came upstairs uninvited to give her advice before she left, said white was bad luck, the color of death.

“Led good ruck cuwa, wedding cuwa for blides.” Sai Woo absolutely insisted on red.

There was no point in telling her blides wore white in America. It was a good ruck color here. Sai would only have argued that bad Chinese spirits can go anywhere, don’t respect borders.

A surly waitress with a protruding gold tooth unceremoniously dumped a pot of tea on the table. April poured some in the two tiny cups. In her cup one lone tealeaf drifted gently to the bottom. She hadn’t waited long enough for it to steep. Probably meant she’d blown her whole life.

A few seconds later the same surly waitress stopped beside their table with a rolling metal thing that looked like a hospital supply cart. The top-shelf offering was bamboo steamers filled with some unidentifiable gelatinous mass.

George waved her away. He turned out to be the second kind of Chinese body type—five seven, maybe five eight, his physique undefined and on the pudgy side. His lightweight navy warm-up suit with red stripes down the arms and legs didn’t help. April guessed he wanted to look sporty and athletic, not overdressed for the occasion. His round face was studded with wholly unremarkable features, small mouth, small nose, deeply set serious eyes that didn’t want to make contact with hers. April was unimpressed and couldn’t get her mother out of her mind.

“Be nice,” Sai Woo had warned. “Tomolla, I don’t wanna hear you stick up.”

“I’m not stuck up.”

“Everybody say you stick up.”

Yeah, well. Chinese didn’t trust the police. Even one of their own. April spotted another cart heading toward them through the crush. She watched the steamed buns filled with barbecued pork that were her favorite disappear along the way. Suddenly she felt old and remembered her mother’s other warning: Smart girl loses innocence but not hope. Stupid girl loses everything.

Nowadays when April went to Chinatown, she saw it with a more critical eye. When she had lived and worked there, she never thought about the garbage that shopowners threw on the street. It was nothing to see fish guts floating in fetid puddles in the gutters along with crumpled newspapers, rotten fruit and vegetables, rags. Roaches and rats ran around like honored guests. Now the place looked like a slum to her. Why couldn’t they clean it up? What was it with Chinese and garbage?

The cart got to them. No roasted pork buns were left.

April shook her head at the ancient fried wontons that remained. This was some place for a first date. The noise level was deafening. There were too many people in a very small space, and dozens more blocking the sidewalk outside. Along with frying smells, the air was charged with the powerful odor of old garlic from what felt like ten thousand eager Chinese mouths, all shouting and eating a mile a minute. This dim sum parlor on Doyers Street, a tiny cul-de-sac off Mott, was packed all day every Sunday. Chinese from all over the tri-state area came into town for their weekly food pilgrimage, brought the family, and ate all day long, pausing long enough only to buy more food to take home in their overburdened American station wagons.

“You wanted that?” George asked, looking her in the eye for the first time.

April shrugged. “When she comes back.”

George stopped the waitress and spoke rapidly in Chinese, telling her to bring a cart of the best dim sum, not the stuff that had been sitting there in the kitchen, waiting all morning for the noon rush. “Hurry up, and don’t stop on the way—” He turned to April. “How about a beer?”

At her nod he added, “And bring us two Tsing Tao.”

That done, he picked up his chopsticks and fiddled with them. “So, your mother knew my mother in China. Know anything about that?”

“Might have known each other, but they didn’t come from the same place,” April replied. “We never met.”

“They call each other sister-cousins,” he pointed out.

“Yeah, well, if they’re sister-cousins, how come they live in the same city and were out of touch for twenty-two years?”

His smile lit up his face. “You’re the detective.”

He had a nice, cultured voice. Without intending to, April smiled back. “Maybe some kind of feud. Maybe they’re not such good friends.”

“Then why introduce us?”

“Could be spite,” April speculated. She was known to be stuck up, hard to please. Her rejecting the doctor son of an old enemy would make the enemy lose face. On the other hand, if the doctor rejected her, Sai Woo would lose face. All around it was risky. Pretty much a no-win situation.

“Could be desperation.” George laughed, opening his mouth wide enough to reveal white, even teeth. “Anything for a grandson to carry on the name.”

“My mother would settle for a granddaughter. Where did you go to school?”

“Queens. Then Columbia all the way.”

April guessed he meant college, medical school, and all that other training. She frowned. And then he came down to Chinatown to practice when he had never been stuck here in the first place? That didn’t make sense. Why would he return to a place he’d never been? Most ABAs who got to college and learned to blend married Caucasians if they possibly could. They didn’t exactly come stampeding back to live with the immigrants just off the plane.

“You live down here?” she asked.

He shook his head.

The steamed buns came. April bit into one. “Ummm. Food’s good.”

He drank down some of his beer, nodding. “You have to be in the right mood though.”

Ah, so that was it. He hadn’t known what kind of girl she was, and didn’t want to be seen with her if she wasn’t up to a better place. She flushed, feeling put down by the Ivy League graduate. Last spring she’d laid eyes on Columbia University for the first time. She had a missing person from there. Seventeen-year-old girl. The girl was killed in California, and April Woo was the one who located her.

All right, so maybe she was a cop, a street person, not a doctor, not exactly a first-class medical school graduate. Okay. Maybe she was just a cop. But in a month she’d be a cop with a college degree herself. And if she had anything to do with it, she’d be a sergeant in the department, too.

“Is that a tennis bag?” She jerked her chin at the bag at his feet.

“Yes. You ask a lot of questions.”

“I’m a cop. It comes with the territory. How did you get to be a doctor?”

He smiled again, sipped more beer. “I studied for a lot of years. And my parents wanted a docta.” He twisted his face into old style. “You know how that is. Ten thousand pounds of steaming guilt a day. ‘Have dumpring. Study book. Be docta. Take care palents.’ I really didn’t have much choice.”

Another cart came by. This one was filled with pearl balls and shui mai. April took the shui mai. She’d heard that in old China dim sum was served in tea houses for breakfast. The words “dim sum” meant “touch the heart lightly.” She tried to concentrate on the meaning of the words and the delicate taste of shrimp and dried mushroom. Yes, she knew exactly how much ten thousand pounds of steaming guilt a day weighed on a child’s shoulders. She liked the image and his joking about the accent, liked the gold signet ring on his finger.

He drank down half the beer and looked at her appraisingly. “What made you become a cop?”

She tasted hers, considering an answer. She didn’t want him to think badly of her parents for not insisting she go to Columbia. Didn’t want to insult her parents by implying poverty. She put her glass down. The beer was warm. “There seemed to be a need.”

In response to that, her beeper sounded from inside her lucky red blazer.

George looked surprised. “What’s that?”

“My beeper. Something must have come up. I’m sorry. I have to call in.”

She pushed her chair back and made her way through the crush to the front of the restaurant, where a pay phone hung prominently behind the cash register. She dialed the squad number.

“What’s going on?” she asked when Sanchez came on the line.

“Where are you?”

“Doyers Street.”

“Chinatown. What’re you doing down there?”

“It’s lunchtime, my day off. I’m having lunch.” April tried not to sound impatient. “What’s coming down?”

“Braun wants you in here now. Third floor, examination room.”

“Yeah, what for?” Adrenaline and alarm shot through her in equal measures.

“He’s got Maggie’s boyfriend.”

“No kidding.” April’s heart thudded. How did he do that, when she and Sanchez had missed him? Son of a bitch. This wasn’t going to go down well with Sergeant Joyce or Captain Higgins.

“No kidding. And get this. Braun wants his team there with him.”

Oh, now they were a team, great. April looked at her watch. She’d been with George Dong all of twenty-three minutes. So much for dating. “Twenty minutes max,” she promised.

Sanchez hung up without comment.

April pushed her way back to the table through an even larger crowd than had been there earlier. George Dong, the doctor, was smiling at her. She noticed he was not so very ordinary-looking when his mouth turned up at the edges. As she approached the table, she had a minute to wonder if he really played tennis or if he just carried the racquet around for show. Lot of people were sneaky like that.

“You have to go, right.” It wasn’t even a question. He knew.

“Sometimes it happens. I’m really sorry. The case I’m working—something’s come up.”

“It’s okay. I know how it is,” he said magnanimously.

But she knew it wasn’t okay. All the way uptown, she had a really sick feeling about the whole thing. She didn’t know if there was any way to make it all right with him. She figured the worst case was he’d bad-mouth her to his mother. His mother would bad-mouth her to her mother and her mother would kill her. Best case he wouldn’t say anything.